The world is suddenly awash with tablet computers, and not just awash, but swamped by a sea (enough water?) of ultra cheap models. Every day the price reduces and/or more performance and features are added in for the same price.

But are these bottom of the pile products actually worth investing in, or should they be treated like angry drunk polar bears, and avoided at all costs? We take a look at one to find out.

Our choice of tablet is the Yeah Pad Pillbox7 7 Inch Android Tablet model, which comes with a range of conventional features all wrapped up in a bottom of the barrel price which would make a bargain hunter blush.

We had our review tablet shipped in directly from the Chinese outlet and the first thing we noticed is the sad fact that somewhere along the line, the box had been sat on by a large elephant. We think. Luckily the crushed exterior didn’t translate into any damage to the contents, and we were relieved to see everything in as-new condition and working fine.

The package contains the tablet itself, a small 16 page user guide which is surprisingly well written, a charging block and a OTG USB adapter so you can connect standard USB peripherals and/or external 3G cellular dongle for remote computing (more on that later). It’s sparse, but it’s actually all you need to get the job done.

In Operation

The first thing you notice when you switch on the tablet, apart from a fairly lengthy boot time which is normal for this type of product, is the very fancy splash screen. Someone in YeahPad Inc .cn is a child of the 60’s, and who are we to complain?

Once you’re booted into the home screen, everything is as you would expect. The system runs Android 4.0.4 (although for some weird reason the web page says 4.0.3), and there are no real surprises. The screen is surprisingly responsive, at least compared to some of the older Android tablets we have seen, and you can move around quite quickly, which is nice.

The system supports the full Google Play app store, and so you have access to all the 700,000 apps or whatever the number is today. There’s a 0.3 megapixel camera built in for video calls, 4GB of internal storage, WiFi, accelerometer, 3.5 mm headphone port and support for up to 32GB microSD card.

The unit plays games with no problem, the graphics are crisp and the touchscreen responsive enough to cope with conventional controls. The only real question about the performance of the product comes, as you can see from our video hands-on below, when you start to do web browsing. Read on for the hands-on video reviews and more details and specifications.